In a typical cable/MSO or wireline network, ad-splicer plays a significant role due to its ability to splice the advertisements or commercials into the live video streams using analog or Digital Program Insertion (DPI). More specifically, an ad-server typically stores the commercial content and streams it as MPEG digital video stream, for example, to the ad-splicer when triggered by digital cues. Using digital ad insertion standard such as SCTE35 or DVS 253 (which supports the DPI cueing message that are embedded in the single or multi program transport stream), the ad-splicer may be configured to insert the MPEG digital video stream carrying advertisement content (also referred to as ‘ad stream’ where ad is a short form of advertisement) into the programmer's digital video streams. The terms pre-spliced and post-spliced video traffic refer to the programmer's digital video streams before and after the ad-insertion.
A typical cable/MSO network coverage may be divided into multiple markets based on the geography and viewers. Furthermore, a single market may typically have a number of advertisement zones which may be demographically grouped areas of a market that receive the same advertising content. The advertisement zones are physically covered by hubs, which may contain devices including routers, ad-splicers, and Quadrature Amplitude Modulators (QAMs). The hubs may connect to each other and to the video headend via the IP/MPLS network. A single hub may be configured to serve one or more advertisement zones. Since each ad-splicer serves a single advertisement zone, a hub with multiple advertisement zones may include a set of multiple ad-splicers, one or more for each advertisement zone.
Video and content service providers have relied upon the ad-splicer capability to insert the appropriate advertisements or commercials into the live video streams as a substantial revenue source. Thus, ad-splicer failure or downtime has significant impact both in real time transmission service disruption as well as loss of potential revenue from advertisements or commercials which do not get transmitted. Indeed, the undesirable mean time to repair such ad-splicer failure can range from a few minutes to several hours.
Present approaches to address ad-splicer failure include human intervention, where a technician may be dispatched to the hub site to physically move the links from the failed ad-splicer to a redundant ad-splicer in the hub site.